M&A in Poland: Onet.pl and Gruper.pl are sold

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I could have come up with a better headline, for example “In the wake of the upcoming European Football Championship, Polish Internet entrepreneurs are selling their businesses”. But since I do not blog for Business Insider, I’ll stick to a boring one instead.

Onet.pl

The majority of Onet.pl, the number six most visited website according to Alexa (after Google, YouTube, Facebook and Allegro) has been sold to Ringier Axel Springer for a 217,5 million Euro. Onet.pl was founded back in 1996.

The deal will have to first be cleared by the antimonopoly regulators, according to Ringier Axel Springer press release.

The buyer of 75 percent of the company Ringier Axel Springer Media AG is a joint venture between German Axel Springer AG and Swiss Ringier AG, headquartered in Switzerland. It is one of the leading media companies in Central and Eastern Europe, with operations in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Serbia.

Gruper.pl

I have moderated a CEE panel at Daily Deals Summit Europe in March this year, where I met Tomasz Dalach, the co-founder and member of the board of Gruper.pl, Poland’s leading competitor of Groupon, with 20-25 percent market share, offering over 2000 deals every month.

This week the majority of Gruper has been sold. Having previously purchased 10 percent of the company in 2010, German media holding Grupa Polska Presse acquired a total of 54 percent of Gruper, according to Proseed Magazine. Tomasz Dalach and Marcin Mikolajczyk are leaving the company. The details of the deal have not been disclosed.

And now back to football: according to local sources, it is going to be tense in Warsaw next week, as Russia is apparently sending trainloads of the football fans in that direction to watch Poland-Russia game. Thankfully, on the 12th of June I will be in a peaceful Cracow, at Bitspiration. See you there.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.